ABSTRACT
On the desert floor below the eastern face of California's craggy Sierra Nevada, a 560-acre prison, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with machine guns and searchlights, took shape during the spring and summer of 1942. In March 1942, thousands of American citizens, without being charged of a single crime, were imprisoned. By November, 106,770 Japanese-Americans found themselves locked away for the duration of the war. The Japanese-American community contained many artists, and the camp newspapers offered them an outlet for their work. The first internment camp to have a newspaper was Manzanar. In August of 1943, the paper's expenses were completely subsumed by the War Relocation Administration, which found camp newspapers "useful in making instructions known." John Barry wrote, "the newspapers will be material for history, records of a curious interval, sought by collectors, preserved in libraries." Barry's prediction underestimated their value. The papers remain as an enduring chronicle of the wrongful imprisonment of Americans.
